(Let’s not blame the story’s picture captions on Ms Tan). She was once one of my favorite novelists. Now, her attention has turned to capturing local birds’lives into charming drawings Amy Tan turns to the birds

Thanks for sharing the article! As a birder, I especially appreciate that she says she does not count birds suggested by Merlin unless she sees them! And her drawings are simply delightful.

I heard an interview with her about her bird book on the local radio. One thing I found disturbing about it is that in order to observe and draw the birds, she was putting out thousands of meal worms every day for years, sometimes several thousand a day, in addition to many other kinds of foods and …

What a lovely article.Thank you for sharing it. Thanks to retirement I have been able to spend a lot of time with my garden birds; just the “commoners” found in a lot of Johannesburg gardens. What I have really enjoyed has been getting to know all the calls so that whatever I’m doing I can still bir…

Yes, you raise an interesting point. Hmmm… the NYT article above talks about how she has a relationship with the birds as a dependable source of food. She lives in Oakland, which is a part of a very large metropolitan area, with some pockets of green space. Lots of people have bird feeders. I’ve t…

[image] teellbee: the NYT article above talks about how she has a relationship with the birds as a dependable source of food. If you can call that a relationship. It’s nice when butterflies come to me. But it isn’t because they like me; it’s because I have skin salts. It’s nice when minnows …

Why sad? I don’t expect any animal, other than maybe my dogs, to feel anything toward me but indifference, wariness, or fear. I’d like a bird to sit still while I try to photo it but I don’t expect it to. If the relationship with certain wildlife is purely transactional — I provide food and the b…

[image] jasonhernandez74: If you can call that a relationship I did not think this was meant as ‘relationship’ in the same sense as bonding with another human type of relationship. Relationship is a broad concept and I interpreted the statement in the article as a larger meaning of the word.

[image] jnstuart: Why sad? Because it emphasizes the gulf between us and nature.

True there is a gulf in understanding or empathy or trust or however you want to define it between humans and other animals on the planet. Maybe dogs and dolphins are an exception, and I’m sure there’s still some disconnect with them. There’s the same gulf between almost any pair of nonhuman species…

Of course, you can go really gloomy and say that the same thing about the gulf between humans and other humans. How well does anyone ever really understand another being? I prefer to think about what connects us. Out of all the planets in the universe, we live on the same one! We share this planet …

Amy Tan’s new bird book (and feeder thoughts)

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Amy Tan’s new bird book (and feeder thoughts)

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